Reading List (February 2023)

Hey, welcome back to the reading list. It's a short month, but I've still got plenty of stuff to read and watch. Without further ado, let's jump in.

The Design of Games

[Read] A Tale of Two Relics - "[Obra Dinn and Case of the Golden Idol] stand on their own as engaging and innovative entrants into the mystery genre thanks to their unique take on logic-based puzzles. "

[Read] Vampire Survivors and The Glory of Floor Chicken - "Floor Chicken serves as a quintessential example of how every system in this game interlocks and mutually reinforces each other"

[Read] The hourglass philosophy behind Dishonored and Deathloop's level design - Eurogamer interviews Arkane's Dana Nightingale, to talk loopy level design.

[Watch | CC | 19 mins] What's the Deal with Fast Travel? - "Fast travel is a bedrock of game design, but what's the point of fast travel anyway?"

[Read] One Day, This Videogame Will Be Perfect - "15 years and a great expense later, the new Dead Space’s Ishimura is exactly the same, only more intricately rendered."

The Development of Games

[Read] Death in service - "It must be horrible to work on a failing live-service game, ploughing on through the content roadmap, while the graphs tumble unstoppably down"

[Watch | 15 mins] Results After Releasing my First Game on Steam - "It's been a month since I released Punch A Bunch on Steam. In this video I sum up how the release went, reception, how many copies I sold and what the future holds."

[Watch | 28 mins] How to make a Game - from Start to Finish! - The developer of Patch Quest explains the long road from initial idea to Steam release.

[Watch | 15 mins] How Do Videogames Even Work Anyway? - Same dev, very different video

[Read | Long Read] Deep Dive: A framework for generative music in video games - "The goal is to use computational creativity and generative techniques to extend the capabilities of human composers."

[Read] Teardown Frame Teardown - "Teardown is, in my view, a love letter to decades of real-time games and graphics".

The Playing of Games

[Watch | 4 mins] I rewrote Portal from scratch and solved the Portal Paradox - "The Portal Paradox has been the subject of a lot of debate online, but now it has been implemented by rewriting Portal with moving portals."

[Read] In praise of the 7/10 - "I like bad games. They can often be more interesting than the current standard of highly polished, triple-A titles"

[Read] Your Brain is Made of Meat - "At some point, in your experience playing Dead Space - whether the original or the remake - you're probably going to start desecrating corpses."

The Art of Games

[Read] How can games engage with the complex realities of mental health? - "Games that convey the experience of depression and grief – particularly indie games – have flourished in the past few years,"

[Watch | 14 mins] Overanalyzing the Undeniable Style of Hi-Fi Rush - Looking at cel shading, ben-day dotting, and more.

[Watch | CC | 35 mins] A Tale of Two God of War 2s - Jacob Geller looks at two God of War sequels, and how they both challenge the idea of fate in different ways

[Read] Citizen Sleeper: Communities of Food - "The game believes in your capacity to survive – and not just survive, but to survive with others, pulsing with creation."

[Read] The Indie Pop Legacy Of Super Mario Land 2 - "It’s a good example of the rather inconsistent way video game music gets recognized by the larger pop music machine."

The History of Games

[Read] How Bill Gates’ Minesweeper addiction helped lead to the Xbox - "While Minesweeper love at Microsoft wasn’t universal, the game managed to get its hooks into the most important backer a Microsoft game could have."

[Watch | CC | 25 mins] Wario Land 3: The Best Nintendo Game - "We dive into 2000's Wario Land 3; the full realization of Nintendo R&D1's decade of handheld experimentation. "

[Read] How the greatest Japanese RPGs of the ‘90s came to the West - "In the span of just a few years, Western localizers, using laughably rudimentary technology and techniques, redefined what it meant to translate and localize video games for Western audiences."

Beyond Games

[Watch | mins] How The Parthenon Marbles Ended Up In The British Museum - From the comments: "Why are there Pyramids in Giza?" "Because they’re too big to put in a British museum"

[Read] Steven Spielberg’s Oscar Curse - "Inside nearly 50 years of frustration at the Academy Awards for the most popular director of all time."

[Read] ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web - "It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it"

[Read] ChatGPT is just the beginning: Artificial intelligence is ready to transform the world - "New chatbots capable of generating text and images from a few, simple prompts provide glimpses of how AI could change the workplace, education, superpower relations and our daily lives"